Elon Musk Just Unveils NASA’s Alien Tech Engine: As the aerospace industry is moving forward on new technological progress making light speed travel more and more possible. Many are wondering whether or when the next big leap will be taken.
Well, the big leap is here and so many are now finding it hard to believe their eyes and their ears as Elon Musk and NASA collaborate to bring a new and updated light speed engine that is so unreal many are calling it alien tech.
Could Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, become a real-life Zefram Cochrane, the fictitious Star Trek inventor of warp drive? In 2019, astronomer and scientific icon Neil deGrasse Tyson seemed to concur.
Tyson sent Musk a short message on Twitter, asking when the entrepreneur will stop tinkering with Mars rockets, Hyperloops, Cybertrucks, and brain-computer interfaces and instead focus his efforts on inventing a warp drive like the ones shown in Star Trek to propel spacecraft across galaxies.
“Sincerely, Space Geeks of the World,” he signed it. Musk isn’t going to transform SpaceX and Tesla into side projects, so he responded to Tyson with a strong case for sticking to his main goal of building a Martian metropolis.
“If we create a city on Mars, Earth-Mars travel will be a powerful forcing function for inventing something like warp drive.” This Twitter exchange isn’t going to affect Musk’s course or get us any closer to a true warp drive even though it might be possible at some point in the future.
We’ll have to be content with SpaceX’s current Mars settlement plans. Elon Musk has claimed that SpaceX could launch the next-generation Starship rockets, which he believes would someday transport humans to Mars, for a fraction of the amount that NASA spends to launch rockets into space.
According to Space.com, Musk has stated that it will require $900,000 worth of fuel to get SpaceX’s “fully reusable” system into orbit. He told US Air Force Lt. Gen. John Thompson at the Air Force’s Space Pitch Day that the cost will be “like $2 million,” which is “much less than even a tiny rocket.
“The economics have to be something like that to build a self-sustaining city on Mars,” he wrote, before noting that “a thousand ships” will be needed to create such a settlement.
According to Futurism, the typical NASA launch costs $152 million, thus Musk estimated that the Starship could send humans to space for 1.3 percent of tha[2] t. The plans call for a million-man Mars city to be built once the pricing issue is solved, and it will be important.
Musk, a frequent opponent of US lawmakers and legislation, stated once that “government is the ultimate corporation” and that restrictions may stifle innovation. He also told Time that the government should stay out of people’s possessions, such as his $297 billion fortune.
He said this in the midst of a discussion regarding what type of government his Mars city is supposed to follow. He favors direct democracy over representative democracy, in which citizens elect local leaders to represent them in the legislature or congress.
“A representative democracy is subject to special interests and coercion of politicians and that kind of thing,” Musk said in the interview, published Tuesday. “I’d recommend that there is direct democracy — the population votes on laws themselves, and the laws must be short enough so that people can understand them.”
More accurately, a Mars city would be a technocracy, meaning that engineers and scientists will end up owning most of the means of production and legislative power. Rather than political ties, legislative skills, or popularity, decision-makers are chosen based on specific expertise and performance.
Such a society geared towards idealistic scientific ventures with near-bottomless SpaceX resources at hand could very well bring us close to sci-fi technologies such as warp travel and easy nuclear fusion quicker than ever imaginable. But, has such a thing been tried before?
You’d be surprised! David Burns, a NASA engineer, has developed a new way to travel through interstellar space: a “helical engine” that could theoretically push a spaceship forward without any fuel.
He submitted his idea to NASA’s Technical Reports Server, which provides access to NASA-created or funded aeronautical documents including meetings, journal publications, reports, and patents, among other things.
Burns, speaking to New Scientist, the publication that initially reported on his work, said he is ready for any criticism. “If someone says it doesn’t work,” he told the magazine, “I’ll be the first to admit, it was worth a shot.” You have to be prepared to be embarrassed.
It is very difficult to invent something that is new under the sun and actually works.” The EmDrive, which creates thrust using microwaves inside a restricted chamber, is one of several concepts for enhancing spacecraft for interstellar travel.
Since then, testing has shown that the EmDrive isn’t going to function. According to Burns, his helical engine operates by accelerating ions in a loop. The engine would then shuttle the ions back and forth along the path of travel, altering their mass slightly to create thrust.
The helical engine would need to be 650 feet long and 40 feet wide to work, according to New Scientist. “This in-space engine could be used for long-term satellite station-keeping without refueling,” Burns wrote. “It could also propel spacecraft across interstellar distances, reaching close to the speed of light.
The engine has no moving parts other than ions traveling in a vacuum line, trapped inside electric and magnetic fields.”
Burns, on the other hand, acknowledges that the study was not peer-reviewed and that problems in his calculations “may exist.” One of the specialists that put the Em Drive to the test was Martin Tajmar of the Dresden University of Technology in Germany.
The helical engine will most certainly have the same problems as the Em Drive, according to New Scientist. “All inertial propulsion systems—to my knowledge—never worked in a friction-free environment,” he is quoted as saying.
One may think of UFOs piloted by extraterrestrial beings upon hearing about light-speed travel. Specifically, they might think of the tech being elusive and completely unusable by us even if those UFOs visit us and ‘troll’ us in various encounters as the kids say.
According to two Raytheon experts, aliens moving near the speed of light won’t go unnoticed. Their article, which was published on the arXiv, claims that fast-moving cars would still be visible due to the way photons interact with them.
Near-light travel is not yet conceivable for humans, although it is mathematically plausible. Because of the emptiness between the stars, there aren’t many obstacles for a starship to meet (space is named space for a reason).
They will, however, confront difficulties that slower vehicles do not have to deal with at very high speeds. Photons would be one of the hurdles near the speed of light. Other particles may possibly injure a ship like this, but writers Ulvi Yurtsever and Steven Wilkinson dismiss this possibility.
Photons may produce drag in space, and a fast-moving spaceship will generate an energy signature that will be visible in the infrared spectrum because it will encounter so many more photons than a ship going slowly.
So, if aliens ever come buzzing about our galaxy at near-light speed, we’ll most likely notice their photon wake, and if we can make contact with them, maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to persuade them to share their propulsion technology with us to study. But what is currently preventing humanity from achieving this feat? In a nutshell, it’s all about energy.
As a result of its movement, any moving object contains energy. Physicists refer to this as “kinetic energy.” You must enhance your kinetic energy to go faster. The problem is that raising speed necessitates a significant amount of kinetic energy.
To make anything go twice as quickly, it needs four times the energy. Increasing something’s speed by three times requires nine times the energy, and so on. To accelerate a teenager weighing 110 pounds (50 kilograms) to 1% of the speed of light, it would need 200 trillion Joules. That’s almost the same amount of energy consumed by 2 million people in the United States in a single day.
Engineers must design new means for manipulating items in space for the time being. Rocket fuel, which is akin to gasoline in a car, is used by all rockets, including SpaceX and Blue Origins’ sleek new rockets. The problem is that the burning of fuel is inefficient.
Other approaches to drive a spacecraft include using electric or magnetic forces. Nuclear fusion, which powers the Sun, is also significantly more efficient than chemical fuel.
One intriguing method for getting things going rapidly is to use a solar sail. These are large, thin plastic sheets mounted to a spaceship that enable sunlight to press against them in the same way as wind presses against a sail.
A few spacecraft have used solar sails to demonstrate that they work, and scientists believe that a solar sail might propel a spacecraft to 10% of the speed of light. Time will have to prove whether Musk’s Martian city-state can make it work.
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